If you want full host monitoring and control from a single point using MonALISA, this is what you have to do. Careful, if you only need monitoring of a bunch of hosts and devices there is a much simpler approach, MLSensor, but more about this in the next episode.(more…)

The days of hacking are not over! Installing Linux on newish hardware is always a challenge and a bit of fun. If you didn’t search carefully beforehand and got yourself a beast like this read below for instructions on how to make Linux work on it.(more…)

Imagine you have a web site in some language (!=en) where you have some special characters (letters + some modifiers). Add some SEO requirements (links ending in .html, URL should contain the article title) and you get a big headache. Or you want to provide search capabilities that would match the text no matter if the user inputs the correct spelling (special characters) or the simplified (ASCII-like) words.(more…)

ALICE has come up with a special request from the monitoring system. They want to have DNS-based load balancing of the central services, taking into account the monitoring information. Since all the monitoring is written in Java it would be nice to have the DNS server also in Java.(more…)

This idea came from the need to always have see the status of the AliEn Grid without having to keep several windows with the repository pages open all the time. After some googling around I found this excellent tutorial that made everything clear. The principle is very simple, you have a layout specified in XML, add some JavaScript for the actual work and make everything nice with CSS.(more…)